Okay, I admit it, the iPod's great

(Posted by John.)

Last week, I wrote a hastily-penned post mocking the over-the-top language used to praise the iPod, and was hastily mocked in return.  Live by the sword, I guess.

So I thought I'd offer some penance to the Cult of Jobs by writing about the one way in which the iPod - or more broadly, the industry of portable electronics - may in fact save the world.

Let's start by stating the obvious:  America and the world need to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions, rapidly, in order to avert disaster.  (The British government is expected to release a report tomorrow re-stating this fact, and reinforcing it.)

The two biggest sources of carbon emissions in the United States - and this is more or less true globally - are automotive fuels and coal-powered electrical generating stations.  (Air travel is another major source, in many ways a more problematic one to replace.)  Even with optimistic assumptions about efficiency gains, we almost certainly need to think of some way to replace the amount of electricity we currently supply from coal with a renewable (or, in my view less-desirable, nuclear) alternative.

The inherent problems with renewables, however, are well-known.  They are intermittent - though less than is often assumed.  Wind power is more abundant and stable at night and during the winter, while solar is obviously the opposite.  A well-designed system would rely on that balance.  (It's also important not to confuse intermittency with unreliability.  To put it simply, what's more reliable, the sunrise or OPEC?)

For the moment, let us assume that the costs of renewables are not game-enders.  If we're trying to avoid climate change, that's not unreasonable:  the costs of building or refitting a climate-neutral coal plant might not be able to compete with wind, or even solar, in the future.  Some are even starting to say that solar will be cheaper than conventional alternatives, regardless of your assumptions - a startling claim, even to me.

Even if renewables are cheap, the intermittency problem is not one that can be ignored.  Without investments in reserve power, the Province of Ontario recently concluded that wind's ceiling is 17% of peak load - though more than double that in the winter.  Above that limit, wind power could destabilize the grid operations.

Which brings us to cars.  Probably the least controversial alternative to the gasoline-combustion engine is to replace at least part of the driving fueled by oil with electricity from the grid - the plug-in hybrid (PIH), or more ambitiously the pure battery-electric vehicle (BEV).  Unlike ethanol or biodiesel, electricity does not necessarily compete for food production, does not itself require an oil input (in the US, almost no electricity is generated from oil anymore) and unlike hydrogen does not require any major new inventions.  Even better, an electrical distribution infrastructure has existed in the United States for some time now.  PIHs or BEVs offer at least the potential to replace much of America's oil consumption with electricity made in America (or Canada, the source of much of America's eletricity imports.)

Even better, there's positive feedback between wind and electric cars.  Because each electric car is by definition an electrical storage device, and one of considerable size, the electric vehicle can in fact store electricity generated by wind during the night - when it's most plentiful, but least needed - and re-sell the electricity during mid-day when it's most needed and least available.  In effect, drivers become partners in building reserve power for wind.  This concept is generally known as a vehicle-to-grid system.

Even using some assumptions that I consider conservative, this post at Green Car Congress shows that with a relatively small penetration for BEVs, the capacity for wind power grows dramatically.  With plug-in hybrids (and their smaller battery systems) the penetration needs to be much larger, but as I said I consider many of these assumptions to be conservative.

So if we invest in electric cars of one stripe or another:

1) It allows us to replace imported oil with domestically-generated electricity, which alone may be desirable.

2)  It allows us to replace carbon-intense gasoline combustion with less-harmful fuels.  (Even a car powered by coal-generated electricity is less polluting and less carbon-emitting than a gasoline-powered car.)

3)  Better still, investing in electric cars allows us to dramatically expand the amount of electricity we can gather from the wind - a massive resource.

So it's very, very good news that GM has announced it intends to build a plug-in hybrid.  It's also good news that Tesla Motors has managed to get the good press it has.  Of course, it would have been better, sooner, but we can't have everything.  I would, however, argue that any one of the above benefits would be a justification for generous subsidies for electric vehicles.  That we can have all three benefits is, in the words of the Vice President, "a no-brainer."

(Good marketing on my part - associate the brand with torture and Dick Cheney!)

What does this have to do with the iPod, you say?  Glad you haven't forgotten.  The major difference between Tesla's roadster and GM's now-departed EV-1 is the battery system.  Tesla's car is, according to their website, powered by "several thousand consumer-grade lithium-ion cells."  The decline in costs and increase in quality for lithium-ion batteries has not been driven by the automobile industry, but by the portable electronics industry:  cellphones, laptops, and yes, iPods.

The power consumption for portable electronics have increased so dramatically in the last decade (for laptops it's bigger screens, DVD drives, etc.) that batteries have had a hard time catching up, leading to investments in more efficient electronics and higher-capacity batteries.  Those commercially-available lithium-ion batteries are not only at the heart of the Tesla BEV, but they or their younger, more energetic cousins are likely to be at the heart of the electric cars of the future as well.

So despite my hostility, the iPod may indeed do it's part to save the world.